Chester Inc.
Chester Inc. architects, from left, Pete Brannen, Laura Small, and Steve DeBold look over a plan in the company's Valparaiso headquarters.
Chester, Inc. began in 1936 as a seed company founded by George and Marie Chester and their son, Jack, and although there have been countless changes to the company over the years, still the Valparaiso company stays close to their origins, rooted firmly in the farming industry. The Chester family began as the George F. Chester & Son Seed Company as an extension of their large farm operation located in Morgan Township. The company became one of the early producers of hybrid seed corn in Indiana. In 1947, Charles Bowman and Orville Redenbacher purchased and incorporated the company. Bowman was manager of the Purdue Ag Alumni Seed Improvement Association and was also former manager of the Indiana Crop Improvement Association Seed Certification Service. Orville Redenbacher was Manager of Princeton Farms in Princeton, Indiana, a large farm operation which among other major projects produced hybrid seed corn, certified seeds and, of course, commercial popping corn. The company officially changed to Chester, Inc. in 1967 and their popcorn hybrid seed varieties were produced under the name of RedBow Popcorn Hybrids (Red for Redenbacher and Bow for Bowman). The Orville Redenbacher brand of popcorn was later sold to Hunt-Wesson Foods which is now an operating division of ConAgra.
A display of photos depicting Chester Inc. history hangs on the wall in the conference room at the company's Valparaiso headquarters.
Consumer Products dealers in the country before selling their assets to A&M Farm Equipment of Valparaiso in 2003. Today, Chester, Inc. still is involved in the farming industry, though they also have branched out into other areas of need in the region. Chester’s Inc.'s Director of Marketing and Business Development Rich Shields explains, “We do architectural construction and information technologies in our Valparaiso office, and agricultural systems which is located in north Judson. These parts of the business all have evolved from the farming. For example, farmers needed a place to store the corn, so we store it and water it, and that’s how the agricultural systems evolved. Farmers needed storage areas for their tractors so that’s how the agricultural construction component evolved in the late 1950s. In the early 1980s the farmers needed a way to track their inventories, so that’s how information technology evolved. We were training farmers how to use computers but now it’s full-fledged network implementation. We’ve also added a fourth component. We have a manufacturing facility for El Popular chorizo. We bought the facility as a food processing plant and we connected with a partner about 15 years ago to produce chorizo at this plant.”
Chester, Inc. building at night
Each of the industrial divisions of Chester, Inc. are autonomous, says Shields, but they do all dovetail. “We also work collectively. We have in-house architects that can do all of the preliminary drawings and designs, we have general contractors to do the building, we also have a financing component, and then our informational technology area can come in and integrate that technology piece. We have 40 employees at our corporate division in Valparaiso, and in North Judson we have another 15 employees. Each division is different but they serve at least 200 clients per division,” he says.
Chester Inc. architect Pete Brannen works on plans in the company's Valparaiso headquarters.
But over the years, Chester, Inc. identified and responded to needs in the regional market. They became involved in a number of industries related to farming, albeit some of them in a tangential way. For example, Chester, Inc. was once Indiana’s first Arctic Cat Snowmobile dealer, but due to the seasonality of snowmobiles they also became a John Deere dealer, selling and servicing lawn mowers, lawn tractors and handheld power equipment. They grew to become one of the top four John Deere
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